Anime deconstruction

YandereTheEmo said:
No, people like the shows in part because they're innovative, but more-so because they offer realism, and are generally well-written.

Being a deconstruction with shitty writing doesn't a good show make.

YandereTheEmo said:
No, people like the shows in part because they're innovative, but more-so because they offer realism, and are generally well-written.

Being a deconstruction with shitty writing doesn't a good show make.

mochabearbruh said:

tenkousei said:

people don't necessarily love school days because it's a deconstruction of harem

tsudecimo said:
School days is not a deconstruction, neither is Madoka.

tvtropes said:
deconstruction means to take apart a trope so as to better understand its meaning and relevance to us in Real Life.

EX: Puella Magi Madoka Magica deconstructs many of the most beloved Magical Girl tropes. Namely: the mascot/sidekick, the henshin item, and the apparent "perks".

Even aside from the negative stuff that's particular to Madoka, it also shows that the livelihood of Magical Girl Warriors in general involves a lot of sacrifices: not only potentially putting your life on the line, but also, having to constantly be on the look-out for and fighting bad guys means sacrificing a lot of what it means to have a normal, healthy childhood, by giving up time that could be spent with family, friends or developing your own passion. Other Magical Girl shows will occasionally acknowledge these sacrifices (like with certain Ami story lines in Sailor Moon) but since it's their "destiny," it's easy to handwave them because it doesn't matter what they want anyway. But in Madoka Magica, these are normal girls who have a choice (well, for the most part - Kyubey's one Manipulative Bastard) about whether to risk all this for the sake of being magical superheroes. It's no coincidence that a lot of the Magical Girls either start out orphaned/alone (Mami, and seemingly Homura) or become that way ( Kyoko), since they have the least to lose, and those who don't are in for the biggest worlds of pain (like Sayaka, or Kyoko before she was orphaned).

tsudecimo said:

School days is not a deconstruction, neither is Madoka.

tsudecimo said:

School days is not a deconstruction, neither is Madoka.

tenkousei said:
yeah

people don't necessarily love school days because it's a deconstruction of harem or medaka box because it's a deconstruction of shounen

edit: ninja'd by 4 seconds
also whats up dude you banned from ktt??

Unyilkdr said:
not really, just look at school days.

Unyilkdr said:
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Unyilkdr said:
snip

laidellent said:


TVtropes

plz no

mochabearbruh said:

Yo! Yeah atm but its possible I can come back soon

offmodel said:
Not everyone is a fan of deconstructionism, OP, that's one reason I love the Leijiverse so much - it wasn't deconstructing anything, it was trying to bring back the myth and folklore storytelling style for the space age, which I think is a far more unique idea than deconstructing everything. The same thing with The Big O and Gasaraki as mecha shows from the 90's, the first season of The Big O is a first class neo-noir with heavy Aristotelian elements (there's a reason Frank Miller loves both Ayn Rand and Batman) as well as being a magic robot show. By the same token, Gasaraki was more of a throwback, 70's style sci-fi series within a mecha show, not a deconstruction at all. Deconstructionism is just all the rage on college campuses right now, so you're bound to see it become prominent in a medium that requires some kind of higher education now that the apprenticeship system of animation is dead.

tenkousei said:
and what's your reasoning behind that? because it's pretty much universally recognized as one for going the exact opposite way of a generic 'happy harem ending' development.

Unyilkdr said:
sorry, is they can't be relied, because what i know, deconstruction is like try something different from what thing already mainstream. then what the meaning of deconstruction tropes? please correct me. not only said it's wrong. because tv tropes gave me the closest meaning from what i know.

tsudecimo said:

universally, eh. It's only known for the ending. Some think it's a deconstruction, but that is based and founded through ignorance.

School days is an eroge adaptation with the bad ending adapted. Every eroge has sex scenes hence the name, and some of them have bad ending sometimes gory ones. It doesn't show what it's like to have a harem exist in real life, it's just has cheating as the central theme, Harem is an already real life concept, which where the genre took the name..

There is a lot of anime where the protagonist have sexual relationships with female characters (Yosugra no sora or however you spell that, WA 2, Rambling hearts etc), they are just not as common in anime due to limitations in terms of what they can air. The harem manga that have sex in them don't get adapted. And since most people who claim it's a deconstruction only saw harem anime with normal ecchi and stuff, they automatically assume school days is something groundbreaking.

It's all unintentional. Only real hipsters find School days to be good or something more than a sex invested american-like soap drama trite

ichii_1 said:
Madoka is a semi deconstruction of mahou shoujo (it still had a happy ending)

This is a full deconstruction of mahou shoujo
http://myanimelist.net/manga/40175/Mahou_Shoujo_of_the_End

tsudecimo said:

universally, eh. It's only known for the ending. Some think it's a deconstruction, but that is based and founded through ignorance.

School days is an eroge adaptation with the bad ending adapted. Every eroge has sex scenes hence the name, and some of them have bad ending sometimes gory ones. It doesn't show what it's like to have a harem exist in real life, it's just has cheating as the central theme, Harem is an already real life concept, which where the genre took the name..

There is a lot of anime where the protagonist have sexual relationships with female characters (Yosugra no sora or however you spell that, WA 2, Rambling hearts etc), they are just not as common in anime due to limitations in terms of what they can air. The harem manga that have sex in them don't get adapted. And since most people who claim it's a deconstruction only saw harem anime with normal ecchi and stuff, they automatically assume school days is something groundbreaking.

It's all unintentional. Only real hipsters find School days to be good or something more than a sex invested american-like soap drama trite

tenkousei said:

yeah i agree with a lot of that. but you're missing the point because it doesn't matter whether the creators intentionally tried to deconstruct the genre and do something groundbreaking.

it just so happened that harem, as a whole genre, sticks towards happy endings where the male lead enjoys the company of multiple women and the viewer would want to put themselves in their shoes. maybe they pick a girl at the end, maybe they still can;t decide by the end. either way it's fanservice. the MC is still 'winning.'

the fact that they decided to adapt a bad ending of an eroge and broke off completely from a typical harem end tilted the genre on its head. i think school days sucks and its not good because of that whatsoever. but it most def destroys the fanservice part of harem because at the end of the day you dont want to be in makoto's (i think that's the MC's name...) shoes. in that way, i'd say it's an deconstruction. it's not about school days itself, it's about the deviation school days just so happened to take from everything else in the genre.

and youre absolutely right about school days not being the only harem deconstruction.

Lancehot said:
I didn't like NGE because it was about a whiny little boy who faps to comatose little girls. I am a critic.

Lancehot said:
I liked Madoka because it was about whiny little girls I could fap to. I didn't like NGE because it was about a whiny little boy who faps to comatose little girls. I am a critic.

offmodel said:

I would like to answer this, but, I have fought too many Eva fans for one lifetime. If people don't like deconstructionism but want more of a thinking person's mecha series from the last 20 years, I'd recommend The Big O and Gasaraki, because they are definitely not in that mold.

*I'm gonna go hide now.

tenkousei said:

hope youre back soon bro

tsudecimo said:

I don't think you know what deconstruction means then. The term you are looking for is subversion.

PeripheralVision said:


Is there something wrong with fapping to comatose girls?

mochabearbruh said:
will check it out, no promises on how soon I can finish it tho lol

Poltergeist18 said:
Welp, when I watched NGE, I really couldn't care less if it's a deconstruction of a genre from which I barely watched FUCKING ANYTHING. I wasn't aware of possible tropes and shit that the show was deconstructing, I just liked it for studying the mind of the main character (character, not "characters", as the emphasis on Shinji is tons heavier, but that doesn't really mean everyone else is excluded) in the midst of tons of pretentious shit called the "story" of NGE (it's probably the only example of a show riding on its characters that can still go on with shit story that I know of from what I watched).

Also, people called Gundam a deconstruction for its own period of time, but still, who could care much about something he does not know too much about.

As for Madoka, same thing. I'm not aware of the tropes, really. But I even heard that thing seems more like a reconstruction of the genre.

Poltergeist18 said:
Welp, when I watched NGE, I really couldn't care less if it's a deconstruction of a genre from which I barely watched FUCKING ANYTHING. I wasn't aware of possible tropes and shit that the show was deconstructing, I just liked it for studying the mind of the main character (character, not "characters", as the emphasis on Shinji is tons heavier, but that doesn't really mean everyone else is excluded) in the midst of tons of pretentious shit called the "story" of NGE (it's probably the only example of a show riding on its characters that can still go on with shit story that I know of from what I watched).

Also, people called Gundam a deconstruction for its own period of time, but still, who could care much about something he does not know too much about.

As for Madoka, same thing. I'm not aware of the tropes, really. But I even heard that thing seems more like a reconstruction of the genre.

silverwalls said:

the problem was that shinji didn't fap to the best girl

tenkousei said:

i get it... school days is far from a criticism of the harem genre so i really get why you don't consider it a deconstruction. it's not intentional and it's mindless. but i think you have to consider the audience who have made it more than it really is. like the western anime community especially has assumed school days as a work that shows the negative moral consequences of fucking multiple women. whether these people are dumb thats up to you but thats just part of how its been received.

i havent read up anything about the specific definitions of those words so you're probably right though.

YandereTheEmo said:

Don't backpedal, because while you didn't have the definition in front of you, you were technically right.

A deconstruction is an evaluation of the themes, meanings, and internal workings implicit within a work--or in this case, a genre--through critical analysis.

Under this definition, school days does evaluate the notion of stringing girls along, and the significance of such flippancy in relationships--especially with the frailty of teenage emotions, and their tendency to flip-flop between different extremes. Which is exemplified in the characters' actions.

Furthermore, the show delves into the psyche of an inexperienced boy who's impulses overtake his capacity to empathize with those around them, which in some sense is perfectly understandable and logical when coupled with the fact that many girls are literally throwing themselves at him. Once again, paying homage to the illogicality of harem tropes and internal workings.

There's more reasoning behind it, but you get the point. Intent doesn't necessarily have to be there for a series to offer some form of critical analysis--if a theme is present, unbeknownst to the work's creator, that doesn't mean that the theme itself is null.

Harem_King said:
so being dark in a light hearted genre isn't a deconstruction

wow mal never seizes to amaze me with the ignorance

tenkousei said:

i get it... school days is far from a criticism of the harem genre so i really get why you don't consider it a deconstruction. it's not intentional and it's mindless. but i think you have to consider the audience who have made it more than it really is. like the western anime community especially has assumed school days as a work that shows the negative moral consequences of fucking multiple women. whether these people are dumb thats up to you but thats just part of how its been received.

i havent read up anything about the specific definitions of those words so you're probably right though.

RLinksoul said:

The term has so many different meanings to so many different people, that it's become impossible to even pinpoint what shows qualify as a deconstruction. One could argue that "Ima, Soko ni Iru Boku" is a deconstruction because of how the "other world" is depicted, but someone else could just call that a dark subversion.

Same goes with Madoka. A lot of people who haven't actually watched magical girl shows would say that Madoka deconstructs the genre by showing the dangers of fighting monsters, how it would take away from your social life, and explains where the mascots come from and why they do what they do, which a lot of magical girl shows actually do. You're just not gonna see a character get their head bitten off on a show targeted toward grade schoolers.

PoeticJustice said:


"Deconstruction (French: déconstruction) is a method of critical analysis of philosophical and literary texts which emphasizes inquiry into the variable projection of the meaning and message of critical works, the meaning in relation to the reader and the intended audience, and the assumptions implicit in the embodied forms of expression."

You have never read a book before obviously. The Great Gatsby? That is a deconstruction. Critiques by Nietzche on society? That is a deconstruction.

SNaG21 said:
+1 on the School Days not being a deconstruction. If anything, off-color harem manga (bear with me here) like Shinigami-sama to 4-nin no Kanojo deconstruct harems, picking apart the character tropes or amplifying them while sticking to a literal dating them all harem. The World God Only Knows is also way more of a deconstruction than School Days, and even calling that one is a stretch.

School Days, the VN, has like 20 endings, some of them happy, one of them harem. It's just that School Days is waaaay more famous for its grisly bad endings, and there are more than just the ones shown in the anime adaptation. Choosing a bad ending that's meant to shock is not the same as deconstruction.

Madoka, on the other hand, is not only the textbook example of deconstruction, but its practical fucking ideal, at least in anime.

PoeticJustice said:


Madoka isn't a deconstruction either. I don't see how you can bash one and praise the other, when Madoka is pretty much the School Days of the magical girl genre.

tsudecimo said:

I think the real meaning of the term in literary is much more complex that bringing real life consequences to fantasy settings (someone posted it to me, and I honestly wasn't able to fully comprehend it, as it stated that everything can be deconstruction, as it has something to do with contradiction in the thematic narrative or something like this)

tenkousei said:

thanks for this clarification. it's kind of interesting how school days manages to reveal the flaws of the harem genre but itself is ridiculously generic as a tragedy. i dont see people making that distinction.

i think that's what throws people off more than anything. women falling all over you and letting you walk all over them = unrealistic, but how realistic is this ending? i feel like people who are just, super realists take issue with that and refuse to acknowledge school days. but that edginess and lack of realism has nothing to do with how it still criticizes (whether intentionally or unintentionally) the concept of a harem. at least IMO.